some days are all mondays
Nate. Nate/Dan, Nate/Cater. Vague Nate/Serena and background Blair/Serena.
3586 words. PG13.
Summary: Nate is on his hundredth spiritual journey.
Note: Happy birthday, Juliette!!! I hope it is epic and filled with macarons and puppies. This fic is kind of odd, lol, and I'm not even sure how it came about, but I really hope you like it. Also, I haven't exactly traveled a lot, so I pretty much just watched a lot of Anthony Bourdain and hoped no one would call me out on it.
Dan tastes like tea and cigarettes, burnt and sweet.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” Nate says.
Dan shrugs one shoulder. He wears suits now, gray flannel. The sunlight coming in the window makes his white shirt almost blue. “I didn’t.”
Dan is on his fourth book at this point and Nate is on his hundredth spiritual journey. Dan sips Irish Breakfast with powdered creamer and watches Nate with dark eyes behind his thin-frame silver glasses. Nate wears white t-shirts and jeans and scuffed boots and he hasn’t cut his hair or shaved in god knows.
Aside from the kiss hello, Nate unable to stop himself after so long apart, they don’t touch. Dan was never quick with forgiveness in the first place and now even less so.
“You’re not like I thought you’d be,” Nate says, when the silence drags.
“Funny,” Dan says, inscrutable as ever, “You’re exactly like I thought you’d be.”
They broke up in Rome, amongst the ruins, a metaphor that apparently did not escape Dan even though he was too busy shouting to take in the scenery. The scene later found its way into the novel, down to the last patch of dusty sunlight, every bitten-off expletive. Nate had read it over and over, searching for answers. Though admittedly he hadn’t read most of Dan’s books, he’d read that one so often the pages were worn and tugging free of their binding. It’s the only book he brings with him when he travels and it makes him feel closer to Dan than even the shirt of Dan’s he still wears, red plaid, or the picture of Dan he keeps tucked away.
Dan picks at the crust of his toast. “Why did you want to see me?”
“I missed you,” Nate says easily, watching Dan’s pale slim fingers. “Why’d you say yes?”
“Masochism,” Dan answers without missing a beat.
Dan hasn’t published a book in four years (a decent one in six, he’d say), though only Nate knows he hasn’t written anything at all in that time either. It must kill him that Nate gets paid to write, travel journals and articles, that people tell him he has a ‘unique perspective’ and clear, straightforward style. These words mean nothing to Nate; he just likes to talk about the places he’s been.
“Why’d you put it in the book?” Nate asks before he can stop himself.
Curiously, Dan says, “Put what? Which book?”
“At the Forum,” Nate says. “That last one.”
“Last one was shit,” Dan says. “I don’t know. I wanted you to feel bad.” His eyes narrow behind his glasses. “Did you?”
Nate wraps his hand around Dan’s wrist, pulling Dan’s cigarette to his mouth so he can have a drag. “Yeah,” he says, voice coming out quieter than intended.
Dan leaves his hand there a moment, resting against Nate’s face. “Good,” Dan says.
(Every time I see you, Dan will say later, in the hotel room, against the shell of Nate’s ear, you happen to me all over again.)
Dan’s last book was universally panned. Messy, they called it. Has Dan Humphrey finally run out of steam? Carter delights in Dan’s bad reviews, reads them aloud at breakfast. One called Dan’s prose interrupted and too Woody Allen; another said Dan’s over-reliance on deus-ex-machina childish. Carter loved that.
The last book was the one about Nate, so that’s probably why he likes it.
Nate has a plane to catch and he abandons their tense diner lunch before the check comes. Dan hadn’t been enjoying himself, but Nate can see his jaw clench in annoyance anyway.
Nate drops into his seat besides Carter at the last possible second, earning ire from the flight attendant. That only serves to amuse Carter all the more and it’s with a smile on his lips that he leans in, murmurs, “How’d it go, baby?”
Nate half-shrugs, unwilling to chat. “Fine.”
They fly coach, now.
Nate travels. After scraping his way through high school and scraping his way through college, he’s supposed to scrape his way through law school. He probably would have, too, if Carter hadn’t blown back into town, said, kid, are you looking for adventure or what?
Nate has always been easy to convince.
Carter is all adventure, sleight of hand, slick card tricks. Carter takes him to countries where the air smells like nothing Nate’s ever known. Nate’s seen Europe while walking dutifully two feet behind his mother, while arm-in-arm with Blair, while backpacking with Vanessa; travelling with Carter is nothing like that. It was the lack of hours and minutes confining the day that struck Nate – they would sleep and wake and eat and walk and come and go whenever, unmarked by numbers or sunshine. Nobody cared when he looked like, or sounded like, or thought. And Carter always seemed to know each new place with shocking intimacy, every secret cove and alley. Carter always knew everyone.
They started south and then wound their way around, dipping back into New York for days that pass quick as blinking, returned to crowded trains and planes and buses and boats. They weaved their way through continents, bringing along next to nothing and leaving without much more.
Dan called once while Nate was in Dublin and said, sounding drunk, “I can’t write a damn thing anymore.”
Before that, in India, Nate bought bracelets for Serena, piles of them; snake bracelets with scales like hearts, cool metal with designs beaten in and bits of brightly-colored glass that catch the light. They clinked against each other is his mostly-empty luggage, made him think of her. He worried they would be too small to fit over her hands.
The colors of India were electric and they lingered behind Nate’s eyes even after he left, colors he’d never seen, especially in such preponderance. He bought fabric for Blair, pictured blues and yellows against her pale skin, suspected she would never touch them.
Spice burned in the back of his throat for days. All the villages had names Nate could never wrap his tongue around, language coming thickly to him in whatever form it took. Everything was beautiful, even the cows. In one city the buildings were indigo.
“Gets in your veins,” Carter said, cigarette in hand, staring out a clouded bus window. “This country.”
The sky was different everywhere.
Occasionally Serena came with them. Blair’s idea of travel didn’t jive with theirs and she turned her nose up at the lack of itinerary and the rumpled and dirty state Nate would turn up in. But Serena loved it, of course, and she tagged along whenever she could unglue herself from Blair’s side.
Whenever she was there, Nate didn’t know what they did without her. All three of them matched, dusty boots to dusty jeans, sunburnt and smiling. She stole Carter’s linen shirts and wore them with the ends tied in a knot, exposing tan skin. She swept her hair up into a ponytail and scarf, complained over what the weather did to it though it didn’t look any different to Nate.
Nate thought about sex a lot. He couldn’t help it, Carter giving him flirty looks over shaky train tables while Serena sleepily gulped down her morning coffee. Eventually she found out, or Carter told her, and she just raised her eyebrow at Nate, holding back a laugh.
In Chile she and Carter slept together; in Brazil Nate slept with both of them.
In England everything reminded him of Dan. The countryside, the warm buttery sunlight on dark leafy trees; cold gray London, not unlike home, with its skies that always looked ominously rain-soaked. Nate liked the pubs, sitting removed in a dim corner drinking beer and reading Dan’s book again. Carter liked all of England’s disgusting meat, kidneys and livers and tongues, bone marrow and parsley on bread, words that shouldn’t go together like blood and cake, forming some kind of old-school Poe horror – bloodcake, a word Dan would like.
Nate told him that during the Dublin phone call and Dan deemed it more Lorca than Poe. Nate didn’t really know what that meant, which he said; that made Dan laugh, a rough honest sound Nate hadn’t heard in years.
Dan was that one who said once, absently, “You should write stuff down.”
In Dublin Nate got a tattoo, burned black into the inside of his upper arm where the skin was paler, less touched by the sun. He got it just to get it and so it had no meaning, a small knot eternally interwoven, complete in a way Nate was unfamiliar with. Dan would say everything had meaning. Nate took the gauze off sooner than he should have and couldn’t stop touching its raw edges, thinking it should hurt more than it did.
Carter got one too, large and shadowy gray on his back, joining the slow-growing web of other countries that have left their mark on his skin. Nate hadn’t known Carter had any tattoos until the first time they slept together, in a borrowed bed in Buenos Aires back when Nate was younger and still put-together and Carter had a lot less tattoos.
“It was all starting to blur,” Carter said. “Thought I might forget if nobody marked it down.”
That made him think of what Dan had told him, however many months past. The next day Nate picked up a small leather journal to keep himself from forgetting.
Dan came along just once – to Italy, because he’d always wanted to go. Carter called him a tourist constantly and Dan didn’t argue, buying up travel books and tour guides, making endless notes on what to see.
“It looks like a film,” Dan said, with a kind of wistfulness.
Nate barely spoken any Italian but that didn’t stop him from laughing at Dan’s attempts. Once, after an old man spoke to him rapidly for twenty minutes, Dan only blinked dazedly and said, “Mi chiamo Dan.”
Nate didn’t let him forget it, leaning into Dan’s side and asking every thirty seconds come ti chiami? until Dan kissed him to shut him up.
Carter got bored with Dan easily and grew even more bored of Dan and Nate together. “I hate couples,” he’d grumble, shuffling through a deck of cards to keep himself occupied. Dan would give him the finger while Nate laughed and, really, Nate never should have left them alone with each other.
Nate never knew if Carter told Dan or if they were just too obvious.
Dan smokes in the afterglow (though the only thing glowing about it is the tip of his cigarette). Without the glasses and ties he looks like Nate’s again.
Nate is home, Carter left behind in Korea. By the time Nate leaves New York, Carter will have moved on. Carter doesn’t wait for anyone.
Dan always waits.
“It’s a shame,” Dan says. “I loved Rome, until you.”
Nate glances at him, says awkwardly, “I’m sorry.”
Dan half-shrugs, not committed to the gesture. “Nothing to be done, now.” He puts his glasses back on, which Nate hates, and leans back against the headboard, setting the ashtray in his lap for easy access. They’re in a hotel but not Nate’s hotel. They are utterly untraceable. “I read your column,” Dan says.
Curiously, Nate tilts his head. “Do you like it?”
Another half-hearted shrug. “Yes. But it’s not very good.”
Nate presses his lips together in a frown. “Don’t hold back.”
Dan looks at him, finally, with that amused spark in his eyes that’s been missing the last few times Nate saw him. “It’s not. But I still like it. Everyone does, don’t they? Everything fills you with wonder. That’s why they like you.”
Nate intends to tease, but it’s hard to tease Dan now. Still, he smiles as he asks, “Do you like me?”
Carefully, deliberately, Dan stubs out the cigarette. “Not half as much as I love you,” he says.
A day later, Nate watches Dan give an interview from a shitty computer at a foreign café.
It’s funny, because Dan was always nervous about public speaking. He hated his book readings and chatting with strangers at signings after. He hated interviews, fumbling in person like he didn’t on the page, but all that seems to be smoothed away with the rest of his rough edges. People like to interview Dan – because he’s quick, because he’s funny, because he’s handsome and doesn’t really realize it.
Dan says he has a new book coming out. Nate wonders if that’s true.
Nate finds Carter again in a train station, Munich to Berlin. This is how he and Carter always get together: on the road, between plans, half of Nate’s heart elsewhere. He asks, “How’s your erstwhile lover?”
His hand rests on Nate’s hip, fingers slipping idly through his belt loops, thumb slipping under Nate’s shirt to brush over his skin.
“Fine,” Nate says.
“You always say fine like that, after you see him,” Carter says. He gives a tug and Nate steps closer. “I’m not stupid, gorgeous.”
Nate scans the platform for the train. “I loved him for a long time.”
“Still?” Carter says. He’s not the jealous type – far from it – but you wouldn’t know it to look at him.
Nate studies him, frowning, unsure of what to say.
Carter leans in to brush the ghost of a kiss to Nate’s cheek. “You know,” said with utmost nonchalance, “I fucked him in Rome.”
Nate calls Dan from Berlin on a payphone, hunched into his jacket and pressing close to the cold metal shell to stay out of the rain. He feels more betrayed than he has any right to feel. His opener is, “You slept with Carter.”
There is a pause, during which Nate imagines cigarette ash being tapped into a saucer. Carter smokes too. Nate doesn’t remember what it’s like to kiss someone without the smoky-sweet taste of ashes. “Yes.”
The rain is coming down in sheets, steadily harder. “To get back at me?”
Coolly, “Not everything’s about you.”
“Then why?”
“I don’t owe you anything,” Dan says.
“No,” Nate says. “I guess you don’t.”
But some door between them long locked has sprung open and Dan continues, “I thought I could trust you when you left. And it wasn’t just him, was it? It was Serena too. And god know who the fuck else.”
Nate tips his head back until it hits metal. “Yeah.”
“Did you think about me, at all? Or Blair? You know she and Serena almost broke up over that? But you don’t fucking care, do you.”
Sharply, “Of course I care.”
“Start acting like it,” Dan retorts. Then he hangs up, phone buzzing emptily at Nate until, eventually, he hangs up too.
Nate does care. He ducks his head, tugging up the lapels of his coat fruitlessly as he steps into the rain. He’s just always found it difficult to be sorry.
He meets up with Carter in time for dinner, quick street food consumed while walking back to the hotel. Nate hasn’t looked Carter quite in the eye since they’ve been in Germany and at the moment everything about Carter irritates him – his easy grinning, the way he walks backwards while talking, the lack of a fuck he gives about anything at all.
“Why would you –” Nate starts, then stops.
“More specific, Archibald,” Carter says, turning right side again to avoid colliding with a gaggle of schoolgirls. When Nate doesn’t speak again, Carter’s pace slows and his grin falls away, leaving him with that slightly pouty expression his naturally downturned mouth lends his face. “What’s up, kid?”
Unable to keep the petulance out of his voice, Nate says, “You slept with Dan.”
“Hasn’t everyone?” There’s a mocking edge to Carter’s tone.
“Not you,” Nate says.
“Look, I’ve got little patience for Dan Humphrey.” Carter starts walking briskly again, side-by-side with Nate so he doesn’t have to look at him directly. “But he was all distraught and, what can I say, anger’s a good look on him. Shit happens.”
Destination reached, Carter darts ahead to get the door for Nate. Nate is unmoving.
“What, you gonna be pissed forever?” The hotel door falls shut, people swarming around them. “I didn’t think monogamy was our deal, considering all the other people we’ve fucked.”
“That’s not –” Nate struggles to articulate. “That’s not the point.”
“What is the point?” Carter tilts his head, smile inching back into place, more condescending than pleasant. “What did you think would happen? Good old Dan would brush it off and take you back?”
Nate doesn’t have an answer.
Carter tilts Nate’s face up, taps his chin. “Chin up, baby. It’s not that bad. Everybody makes mistakes.”
The rest of Germany passes in a blur of moody drinking. Carter gets bored with him in Brittany. Nate goes to London, reads and reads.
It’s months before he speaks to Dan again, this time crossing paths in El Paso, where Dan is teaching a short course to some carefully chosen Creative Writing majors. Nate heard about it from Serena who heard about it from Blair, who was apparently very unwilling to give up the information.
“How’s the writing going?” Nate says.
Dan rolls his eyes. “Don’t be a dick.”
Nate grins, a reflex automatic as a pistol. “Get a drink with me.”
“You’re bad news,” Dan says, shaking his head a little. His hair is slightly longer than it was in that diner in Queens but still slicked back; one rebellious curl falls free over his forehead. Nate reaches up to twine it around his finger before tucking it back into place.
“I hear that’s how you like them, Humphrey.”
“I’m not getting a drink with you.”
“For old time’s sake,” Nate coaxes.
“If I go to a bar with you, we’re going to get drunk. And if I get drunk, I’m going to sleep with you. And let’s face it, even if I don’t get drunk, I’m probably going to sleep with you. And that can’t happen.”
Softly, “Why not?”
“Because you broke my heart,” Dan says.
Nate frowns, eyes traveling back over that dislodged curl. “It was a mistake,” he says, and then tries for levity, “Like that time I went out with Penelope Shafai in college.”
“Don’t joke about that,” Dan says, pointing at him warningly. “She put gum in my hair at your graduation.”
Nate laughs, remembering.
Dan’s face takes on a sort of sad, thoughtful expression. “Which part was a mistake?”
“Pretty much the whole thing,” Nate says. “I should have known Penelope was nuts when I found these pictures of me in the back of her –“
“No, no,” Dan says. “With me.”
Nate sobers, mirrors the tilt of Dan’s head. “Not telling you myself.”
“But you still would have done it.”
Nate sighs. “I just – I want –”
“What?”
Nate looks at him. “Everything,” he says helplessly. Dan only nods, looks away, their easy contact severed simple as that. It wasn’t what he was supposed to say; it never is. Impulsively he says, “Let me make Rome up to you.”
Dan’s brow creases. “What?”
“It’s not fair,” Nate says, “that I ruined it. It’s a great city. Let me give it back to you.”
“If I’m not going to let you buy me a beer,” Dan says, “I’m not going to get on a plane with you.” He taps his fingers on the table, a staccato nervous beat. “What about your boyfriend?”
“Carter’s not my boyfriend,” Nate says.
Dan rolls his eyes. “Why would I say yes?”
Nate stills his hand. “Who turns down a free trip to Italy?”
“Oh, no,” Dan says, “I’m sure this is going to cost me.”
Nate makes sure Carter is on the other side of the world when he takes Dan back to Rome, just the two of them re-treading crooked streets. Dan’s Italian is better. He must have practiced.
Nate tags along to all of Dan’s historical hot spots even though he couldn’t care less, all itineraries seeming to lead back to the X-marked scene of their fight. They walk through the ruins quietly for a while until Nate sits, eyes on the sunset streaking gorgeous orange and gold. Sunsets are different everywhere. He wishes absently for New York’s, lavender and blush pink and lipstick magenta. Probably from the pollution, Dan would say. Still beautiful, Nate would argue. Also familiar in an aching way he could use right now.
“Why’d you come?” Nate asks, gaze flicking over to where Dan stands studying the same view.
Candidly, Dan answers, “I missed you, actually. Why’d you ask me to?”
Nate smiles a little, scratches at his scruff. “Masochism.” Dan huffs a soft laugh as he sits beside Nate, who feels suddenly very warmed – by the air, maybe, or just all that aching familiarity. “Take off your glasses.”
Dan does, folding them up and tucking them into his pocket, proper and safe. “Why?”
In answer Nate closes the short distance between them and kisses him, Dan tasting like salt and wine.
“Ulterior motives,” Dan says, eyes still closed. “Should have guessed.”
“It’s just the light,” Nate says, kisses Dan’s cheek and forehead and the bridge of his nose. “Very flattering. Had to do it.”
Dan’s lips split in a smile and Nate kisses that too. “What is this,” Dan says. “What are you doing?”
“Stop talking,” Nate says, hand sliding into Dan’s hair, mussing it finally. “You’re always talking.”
In the morning they decide to go to Palermo, where Nate has never been.
Nate. Nate/Dan, Nate/Cater. Vague Nate/Serena and background Blair/Serena.
3586 words. PG13.
Summary: Nate is on his hundredth spiritual journey.
Note: Happy birthday, Juliette!!! I hope it is epic and filled with macarons and puppies. This fic is kind of odd, lol, and I'm not even sure how it came about, but I really hope you like it. Also, I haven't exactly traveled a lot, so I pretty much just watched a lot of Anthony Bourdain and hoped no one would call me out on it.
Dan tastes like tea and cigarettes, burnt and sweet.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” Nate says.
Dan shrugs one shoulder. He wears suits now, gray flannel. The sunlight coming in the window makes his white shirt almost blue. “I didn’t.”
Dan is on his fourth book at this point and Nate is on his hundredth spiritual journey. Dan sips Irish Breakfast with powdered creamer and watches Nate with dark eyes behind his thin-frame silver glasses. Nate wears white t-shirts and jeans and scuffed boots and he hasn’t cut his hair or shaved in god knows.
Aside from the kiss hello, Nate unable to stop himself after so long apart, they don’t touch. Dan was never quick with forgiveness in the first place and now even less so.
“You’re not like I thought you’d be,” Nate says, when the silence drags.
“Funny,” Dan says, inscrutable as ever, “You’re exactly like I thought you’d be.”
They broke up in Rome, amongst the ruins, a metaphor that apparently did not escape Dan even though he was too busy shouting to take in the scenery. The scene later found its way into the novel, down to the last patch of dusty sunlight, every bitten-off expletive. Nate had read it over and over, searching for answers. Though admittedly he hadn’t read most of Dan’s books, he’d read that one so often the pages were worn and tugging free of their binding. It’s the only book he brings with him when he travels and it makes him feel closer to Dan than even the shirt of Dan’s he still wears, red plaid, or the picture of Dan he keeps tucked away.
Dan picks at the crust of his toast. “Why did you want to see me?”
“I missed you,” Nate says easily, watching Dan’s pale slim fingers. “Why’d you say yes?”
“Masochism,” Dan answers without missing a beat.
Dan hasn’t published a book in four years (a decent one in six, he’d say), though only Nate knows he hasn’t written anything at all in that time either. It must kill him that Nate gets paid to write, travel journals and articles, that people tell him he has a ‘unique perspective’ and clear, straightforward style. These words mean nothing to Nate; he just likes to talk about the places he’s been.
“Why’d you put it in the book?” Nate asks before he can stop himself.
Curiously, Dan says, “Put what? Which book?”
“At the Forum,” Nate says. “That last one.”
“Last one was shit,” Dan says. “I don’t know. I wanted you to feel bad.” His eyes narrow behind his glasses. “Did you?”
Nate wraps his hand around Dan’s wrist, pulling Dan’s cigarette to his mouth so he can have a drag. “Yeah,” he says, voice coming out quieter than intended.
Dan leaves his hand there a moment, resting against Nate’s face. “Good,” Dan says.
(Every time I see you, Dan will say later, in the hotel room, against the shell of Nate’s ear, you happen to me all over again.)
Dan’s last book was universally panned. Messy, they called it. Has Dan Humphrey finally run out of steam? Carter delights in Dan’s bad reviews, reads them aloud at breakfast. One called Dan’s prose interrupted and too Woody Allen; another said Dan’s over-reliance on deus-ex-machina childish. Carter loved that.
The last book was the one about Nate, so that’s probably why he likes it.
Nate has a plane to catch and he abandons their tense diner lunch before the check comes. Dan hadn’t been enjoying himself, but Nate can see his jaw clench in annoyance anyway.
Nate drops into his seat besides Carter at the last possible second, earning ire from the flight attendant. That only serves to amuse Carter all the more and it’s with a smile on his lips that he leans in, murmurs, “How’d it go, baby?”
Nate half-shrugs, unwilling to chat. “Fine.”
They fly coach, now.
Nate travels. After scraping his way through high school and scraping his way through college, he’s supposed to scrape his way through law school. He probably would have, too, if Carter hadn’t blown back into town, said, kid, are you looking for adventure or what?
Nate has always been easy to convince.
Carter is all adventure, sleight of hand, slick card tricks. Carter takes him to countries where the air smells like nothing Nate’s ever known. Nate’s seen Europe while walking dutifully two feet behind his mother, while arm-in-arm with Blair, while backpacking with Vanessa; travelling with Carter is nothing like that. It was the lack of hours and minutes confining the day that struck Nate – they would sleep and wake and eat and walk and come and go whenever, unmarked by numbers or sunshine. Nobody cared when he looked like, or sounded like, or thought. And Carter always seemed to know each new place with shocking intimacy, every secret cove and alley. Carter always knew everyone.
They started south and then wound their way around, dipping back into New York for days that pass quick as blinking, returned to crowded trains and planes and buses and boats. They weaved their way through continents, bringing along next to nothing and leaving without much more.
Dan called once while Nate was in Dublin and said, sounding drunk, “I can’t write a damn thing anymore.”
Before that, in India, Nate bought bracelets for Serena, piles of them; snake bracelets with scales like hearts, cool metal with designs beaten in and bits of brightly-colored glass that catch the light. They clinked against each other is his mostly-empty luggage, made him think of her. He worried they would be too small to fit over her hands.
The colors of India were electric and they lingered behind Nate’s eyes even after he left, colors he’d never seen, especially in such preponderance. He bought fabric for Blair, pictured blues and yellows against her pale skin, suspected she would never touch them.
Spice burned in the back of his throat for days. All the villages had names Nate could never wrap his tongue around, language coming thickly to him in whatever form it took. Everything was beautiful, even the cows. In one city the buildings were indigo.
“Gets in your veins,” Carter said, cigarette in hand, staring out a clouded bus window. “This country.”
The sky was different everywhere.
Occasionally Serena came with them. Blair’s idea of travel didn’t jive with theirs and she turned her nose up at the lack of itinerary and the rumpled and dirty state Nate would turn up in. But Serena loved it, of course, and she tagged along whenever she could unglue herself from Blair’s side.
Whenever she was there, Nate didn’t know what they did without her. All three of them matched, dusty boots to dusty jeans, sunburnt and smiling. She stole Carter’s linen shirts and wore them with the ends tied in a knot, exposing tan skin. She swept her hair up into a ponytail and scarf, complained over what the weather did to it though it didn’t look any different to Nate.
Nate thought about sex a lot. He couldn’t help it, Carter giving him flirty looks over shaky train tables while Serena sleepily gulped down her morning coffee. Eventually she found out, or Carter told her, and she just raised her eyebrow at Nate, holding back a laugh.
In Chile she and Carter slept together; in Brazil Nate slept with both of them.
In England everything reminded him of Dan. The countryside, the warm buttery sunlight on dark leafy trees; cold gray London, not unlike home, with its skies that always looked ominously rain-soaked. Nate liked the pubs, sitting removed in a dim corner drinking beer and reading Dan’s book again. Carter liked all of England’s disgusting meat, kidneys and livers and tongues, bone marrow and parsley on bread, words that shouldn’t go together like blood and cake, forming some kind of old-school Poe horror – bloodcake, a word Dan would like.
Nate told him that during the Dublin phone call and Dan deemed it more Lorca than Poe. Nate didn’t really know what that meant, which he said; that made Dan laugh, a rough honest sound Nate hadn’t heard in years.
Dan was that one who said once, absently, “You should write stuff down.”
In Dublin Nate got a tattoo, burned black into the inside of his upper arm where the skin was paler, less touched by the sun. He got it just to get it and so it had no meaning, a small knot eternally interwoven, complete in a way Nate was unfamiliar with. Dan would say everything had meaning. Nate took the gauze off sooner than he should have and couldn’t stop touching its raw edges, thinking it should hurt more than it did.
Carter got one too, large and shadowy gray on his back, joining the slow-growing web of other countries that have left their mark on his skin. Nate hadn’t known Carter had any tattoos until the first time they slept together, in a borrowed bed in Buenos Aires back when Nate was younger and still put-together and Carter had a lot less tattoos.
“It was all starting to blur,” Carter said. “Thought I might forget if nobody marked it down.”
That made him think of what Dan had told him, however many months past. The next day Nate picked up a small leather journal to keep himself from forgetting.
Dan came along just once – to Italy, because he’d always wanted to go. Carter called him a tourist constantly and Dan didn’t argue, buying up travel books and tour guides, making endless notes on what to see.
“It looks like a film,” Dan said, with a kind of wistfulness.
Nate barely spoken any Italian but that didn’t stop him from laughing at Dan’s attempts. Once, after an old man spoke to him rapidly for twenty minutes, Dan only blinked dazedly and said, “Mi chiamo Dan.”
Nate didn’t let him forget it, leaning into Dan’s side and asking every thirty seconds come ti chiami? until Dan kissed him to shut him up.
Carter got bored with Dan easily and grew even more bored of Dan and Nate together. “I hate couples,” he’d grumble, shuffling through a deck of cards to keep himself occupied. Dan would give him the finger while Nate laughed and, really, Nate never should have left them alone with each other.
Nate never knew if Carter told Dan or if they were just too obvious.
Dan smokes in the afterglow (though the only thing glowing about it is the tip of his cigarette). Without the glasses and ties he looks like Nate’s again.
Nate is home, Carter left behind in Korea. By the time Nate leaves New York, Carter will have moved on. Carter doesn’t wait for anyone.
Dan always waits.
“It’s a shame,” Dan says. “I loved Rome, until you.”
Nate glances at him, says awkwardly, “I’m sorry.”
Dan half-shrugs, not committed to the gesture. “Nothing to be done, now.” He puts his glasses back on, which Nate hates, and leans back against the headboard, setting the ashtray in his lap for easy access. They’re in a hotel but not Nate’s hotel. They are utterly untraceable. “I read your column,” Dan says.
Curiously, Nate tilts his head. “Do you like it?”
Another half-hearted shrug. “Yes. But it’s not very good.”
Nate presses his lips together in a frown. “Don’t hold back.”
Dan looks at him, finally, with that amused spark in his eyes that’s been missing the last few times Nate saw him. “It’s not. But I still like it. Everyone does, don’t they? Everything fills you with wonder. That’s why they like you.”
Nate intends to tease, but it’s hard to tease Dan now. Still, he smiles as he asks, “Do you like me?”
Carefully, deliberately, Dan stubs out the cigarette. “Not half as much as I love you,” he says.
A day later, Nate watches Dan give an interview from a shitty computer at a foreign café.
It’s funny, because Dan was always nervous about public speaking. He hated his book readings and chatting with strangers at signings after. He hated interviews, fumbling in person like he didn’t on the page, but all that seems to be smoothed away with the rest of his rough edges. People like to interview Dan – because he’s quick, because he’s funny, because he’s handsome and doesn’t really realize it.
Dan says he has a new book coming out. Nate wonders if that’s true.
Nate finds Carter again in a train station, Munich to Berlin. This is how he and Carter always get together: on the road, between plans, half of Nate’s heart elsewhere. He asks, “How’s your erstwhile lover?”
His hand rests on Nate’s hip, fingers slipping idly through his belt loops, thumb slipping under Nate’s shirt to brush over his skin.
“Fine,” Nate says.
“You always say fine like that, after you see him,” Carter says. He gives a tug and Nate steps closer. “I’m not stupid, gorgeous.”
Nate scans the platform for the train. “I loved him for a long time.”
“Still?” Carter says. He’s not the jealous type – far from it – but you wouldn’t know it to look at him.
Nate studies him, frowning, unsure of what to say.
Carter leans in to brush the ghost of a kiss to Nate’s cheek. “You know,” said with utmost nonchalance, “I fucked him in Rome.”
Nate calls Dan from Berlin on a payphone, hunched into his jacket and pressing close to the cold metal shell to stay out of the rain. He feels more betrayed than he has any right to feel. His opener is, “You slept with Carter.”
There is a pause, during which Nate imagines cigarette ash being tapped into a saucer. Carter smokes too. Nate doesn’t remember what it’s like to kiss someone without the smoky-sweet taste of ashes. “Yes.”
The rain is coming down in sheets, steadily harder. “To get back at me?”
Coolly, “Not everything’s about you.”
“Then why?”
“I don’t owe you anything,” Dan says.
“No,” Nate says. “I guess you don’t.”
But some door between them long locked has sprung open and Dan continues, “I thought I could trust you when you left. And it wasn’t just him, was it? It was Serena too. And god know who the fuck else.”
Nate tips his head back until it hits metal. “Yeah.”
“Did you think about me, at all? Or Blair? You know she and Serena almost broke up over that? But you don’t fucking care, do you.”
Sharply, “Of course I care.”
“Start acting like it,” Dan retorts. Then he hangs up, phone buzzing emptily at Nate until, eventually, he hangs up too.
Nate does care. He ducks his head, tugging up the lapels of his coat fruitlessly as he steps into the rain. He’s just always found it difficult to be sorry.
He meets up with Carter in time for dinner, quick street food consumed while walking back to the hotel. Nate hasn’t looked Carter quite in the eye since they’ve been in Germany and at the moment everything about Carter irritates him – his easy grinning, the way he walks backwards while talking, the lack of a fuck he gives about anything at all.
“Why would you –” Nate starts, then stops.
“More specific, Archibald,” Carter says, turning right side again to avoid colliding with a gaggle of schoolgirls. When Nate doesn’t speak again, Carter’s pace slows and his grin falls away, leaving him with that slightly pouty expression his naturally downturned mouth lends his face. “What’s up, kid?”
Unable to keep the petulance out of his voice, Nate says, “You slept with Dan.”
“Hasn’t everyone?” There’s a mocking edge to Carter’s tone.
“Not you,” Nate says.
“Look, I’ve got little patience for Dan Humphrey.” Carter starts walking briskly again, side-by-side with Nate so he doesn’t have to look at him directly. “But he was all distraught and, what can I say, anger’s a good look on him. Shit happens.”
Destination reached, Carter darts ahead to get the door for Nate. Nate is unmoving.
“What, you gonna be pissed forever?” The hotel door falls shut, people swarming around them. “I didn’t think monogamy was our deal, considering all the other people we’ve fucked.”
“That’s not –” Nate struggles to articulate. “That’s not the point.”
“What is the point?” Carter tilts his head, smile inching back into place, more condescending than pleasant. “What did you think would happen? Good old Dan would brush it off and take you back?”
Nate doesn’t have an answer.
Carter tilts Nate’s face up, taps his chin. “Chin up, baby. It’s not that bad. Everybody makes mistakes.”
The rest of Germany passes in a blur of moody drinking. Carter gets bored with him in Brittany. Nate goes to London, reads and reads.
It’s months before he speaks to Dan again, this time crossing paths in El Paso, where Dan is teaching a short course to some carefully chosen Creative Writing majors. Nate heard about it from Serena who heard about it from Blair, who was apparently very unwilling to give up the information.
“How’s the writing going?” Nate says.
Dan rolls his eyes. “Don’t be a dick.”
Nate grins, a reflex automatic as a pistol. “Get a drink with me.”
“You’re bad news,” Dan says, shaking his head a little. His hair is slightly longer than it was in that diner in Queens but still slicked back; one rebellious curl falls free over his forehead. Nate reaches up to twine it around his finger before tucking it back into place.
“I hear that’s how you like them, Humphrey.”
“I’m not getting a drink with you.”
“For old time’s sake,” Nate coaxes.
“If I go to a bar with you, we’re going to get drunk. And if I get drunk, I’m going to sleep with you. And let’s face it, even if I don’t get drunk, I’m probably going to sleep with you. And that can’t happen.”
Softly, “Why not?”
“Because you broke my heart,” Dan says.
Nate frowns, eyes traveling back over that dislodged curl. “It was a mistake,” he says, and then tries for levity, “Like that time I went out with Penelope Shafai in college.”
“Don’t joke about that,” Dan says, pointing at him warningly. “She put gum in my hair at your graduation.”
Nate laughs, remembering.
Dan’s face takes on a sort of sad, thoughtful expression. “Which part was a mistake?”
“Pretty much the whole thing,” Nate says. “I should have known Penelope was nuts when I found these pictures of me in the back of her –“
“No, no,” Dan says. “With me.”
Nate sobers, mirrors the tilt of Dan’s head. “Not telling you myself.”
“But you still would have done it.”
Nate sighs. “I just – I want –”
“What?”
Nate looks at him. “Everything,” he says helplessly. Dan only nods, looks away, their easy contact severed simple as that. It wasn’t what he was supposed to say; it never is. Impulsively he says, “Let me make Rome up to you.”
Dan’s brow creases. “What?”
“It’s not fair,” Nate says, “that I ruined it. It’s a great city. Let me give it back to you.”
“If I’m not going to let you buy me a beer,” Dan says, “I’m not going to get on a plane with you.” He taps his fingers on the table, a staccato nervous beat. “What about your boyfriend?”
“Carter’s not my boyfriend,” Nate says.
Dan rolls his eyes. “Why would I say yes?”
Nate stills his hand. “Who turns down a free trip to Italy?”
“Oh, no,” Dan says, “I’m sure this is going to cost me.”
Nate makes sure Carter is on the other side of the world when he takes Dan back to Rome, just the two of them re-treading crooked streets. Dan’s Italian is better. He must have practiced.
Nate tags along to all of Dan’s historical hot spots even though he couldn’t care less, all itineraries seeming to lead back to the X-marked scene of their fight. They walk through the ruins quietly for a while until Nate sits, eyes on the sunset streaking gorgeous orange and gold. Sunsets are different everywhere. He wishes absently for New York’s, lavender and blush pink and lipstick magenta. Probably from the pollution, Dan would say. Still beautiful, Nate would argue. Also familiar in an aching way he could use right now.
“Why’d you come?” Nate asks, gaze flicking over to where Dan stands studying the same view.
Candidly, Dan answers, “I missed you, actually. Why’d you ask me to?”
Nate smiles a little, scratches at his scruff. “Masochism.” Dan huffs a soft laugh as he sits beside Nate, who feels suddenly very warmed – by the air, maybe, or just all that aching familiarity. “Take off your glasses.”
Dan does, folding them up and tucking them into his pocket, proper and safe. “Why?”
In answer Nate closes the short distance between them and kisses him, Dan tasting like salt and wine.
“Ulterior motives,” Dan says, eyes still closed. “Should have guessed.”
“It’s just the light,” Nate says, kisses Dan’s cheek and forehead and the bridge of his nose. “Very flattering. Had to do it.”
Dan’s lips split in a smile and Nate kisses that too. “What is this,” Dan says. “What are you doing?”
“Stop talking,” Nate says, hand sliding into Dan’s hair, mussing it finally. “You’re always talking.”
In the morning they decide to go to Palermo, where Nate has never been.